A Weekend in Greece

Well the trip to the third and final homeland was a success!

Just a quick reminder on what we did day one (separate post if you want to read) we landed in Athens around 12 and headed to our hostel. It seemed like we were in a pretty sketchy area but it was very busy so we figured it couldn't be to bad. We hit the town to go shopping most of the day because the following morning there was a free walking tour that was taking us to all the major landmarks. We were shopping obviously for our necessary souvenirs (watercolor and a Christmas ornament) and shockingly on December 1st it was difficult to find a nice ornament in Greece! I was surprised by the lack of Christmas decorations in the city, let alone the lack of gifts! There were some ornaments but they were pretty plain and tacky looking and even for those they were pretty expensive, so I didn't want to just buy an ornament to say i got one from Greece, I wanted one that had meaning. Eventually I found something that is similar to the famous evil eye. It had the blue glass with a greek flag in the middle and Athens written across it, since that is a huge symbol of the area and it was something I actually liked I got it! We had Gyros for dinner that day and they were great as expected! For the remainder of the night we worked on homework because common we do still have to do school at some point and finals for us is in 1 WEEK! Crazy to believe!

Saturday we were up and ready to go for our free walking tour! We were picking up by a man named George from our hostel, at first it was just Anna and I and two other girls on the tour, but we were informed that we were stopping at two other hotels to pick up some people! We ended up with a group around 10-15 people and George took us to all the major sites. We started in Monastiraki square which is in the center of the city and is apparently a major meeting and gathering point for locals along with a tourist attraction. This place is just filled with shops and leads up to the acropolis! We walked through all the roads looking through the ruins such as the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Ancient Agora, The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, and the Theatre of Dionysus. We saw some much of the ruins on our tour that we hit all of our major points on our list in the 3 hours of the tour! We could see the Acropolis, Parthenon, Temple of Athena, and the Erechtheion from points along the tour, but since it costs money to enter there we didn't actually climb to the top with George. I was surprised to see the amount of graffiti around the city. Its covered, but apparently thats because the city has no law restricting it, and no way of covering it up so its just left alone! But some people think it represents the city well because greeks believe each person is very unique and its a way to represent themselves (Or some excuse George made up to make it seem like it belonged there) But some streets honestly looking cool because of the amount of work on the walls! Our final stop on the tour we walked through a neighbor hood where people from the Islands came to stay originally only for a few months to work but they never ended up leaving so this small area looks like its from a greek island! It was pretty neat! When the tour ended he gave us some recommendations on food and took us to this amazing restaurant called Liondi where we got unlimited wine and samples (more like small portions because I was stuffed when i finished) of traditional greek food for 10 euros! We tried Pita and tzatziki sauce, a greek salad (of course with feta cheese), a baked feta and veggie dish, Pastitsio, Moussaka, and chicken gyros! It was well worth the money considering that ended up being my only meal of the day, but the wine did end up giving me an ever lasting head ache later that night! But lunch was so much fun because most of us on the tour were students, so ten of us ended up going to lunch with George (again this is separate from the tour) and after lunch a group of us went to climb to the top of the hill to see the acropolis. Its crazy how much language brings people together especially when you are the minority. So we climbed to the top saw all the must sees of athens and even got an amazing view of the sunset!

Sunday bright and early (3:30 am) we headed off to the airport to go to Santorini Greece. This has been somewhere I have always wanted to go but in April I was talking with my papa about my trip and i asked him if there was anywhere he wanted me to see and he told me I HAD to get to Santorini and it is somewhere beautiful that he would've loved to see. So obviously I had to go here. So we hopped on our plane and were on our way. We got to our hotel and instantly started planning our day which ended up being pretty difficult. The hotel told us of an excursion that they said we could sign up to do and we decided we wanted to do that, but then the hotel called the company and because its the off season the tour is now only running on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. So that was now out of the picture. Then we decided we were going to just bus to all of the major locations, and the one man told us to be careful because again since its down season the buses are often late and sometimes don't even show up. But we decided to give it a shot. We walked to the nearest bus stop and waiting and after 10 minutes of the bus not showing up we gave up! So we went back down to the hotel and decided to rent a car for 35 euros for the whole day! We just used our GPS to get around the Island and all went well! We got to see the island at our own pace, and manage to sing in the car between locations. Ed Sheeran is definitely loved here. His music was constantly playing and the song Perfect came on every time we were in the car. (But i wasn't complaining) We started at the Black Sand beach were the sand is pretty dark! And there aren't many seashells just rocks, so i did collect a few rocks along the way, but we found these sails that seemed to wash up on the beach and were dead, so we decided to take them and peel whatever was inside out... it went okay and we still have them packed to take home.... we will just have to see how they smell in the morning! From here we went to the Red sand beach which from the name im sure you can imagine is red sand, but to reach the beach you had to scale these rocks which provided amazing views and the rocks themselves were red and beautiful! Then we headed to Fira which is a little town! We shopped around there for awhile, grabbed a Gyro for lunch, then were back in the car on our way to Oia. Oia is known for its sunsets, so after our shopping and it was time for the sunset it was crowded! But the site was breathtaking! The sky light up with colors which reflected off the water and then reflected off the white buildings with there blue accents! I was expecting to see more blue roofed buildings but turns out everything with the blue dome is a church! So blue and white are definitely the common colors, but the other houses use the blue as an accent color with the shutters, gates, and doors! We drove back towards our hotel before getting some dinner because the ride home was full of twists and turns and also on the side of a cliff. SO we wanted to make it back before it was to dark! We found a cute little restaurant just over a mile from our hotel and we stopped in there. I order Soutzoukakia which is like greek sausages and a neat sauce with it! It was delicious and the women even gave each of us a piece of a lemon cinnamon cake which she didn't tell us the greek name for, but again it was good! The cinnamon mad eit taste like Christmas a little bit! But now we are back at our hotel relaxing and doing some homework before another early morning tomorrow (Luckily not till 6:30)to head back to Florence! Our last weekend trip has come to an end and what an adventure it has been!

Views from the Jesus Mountain

Agora

Parthenon

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus

Santorini

Red Sand Beach

My Papa